JF Ptak Science Books

A Great Letter to the Editor & a Major Advance in Particle Physics

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2091

James Chadwick--the discoverer of the neutron and leading Brit investigator in the Manhattan Project--announced his great discovery in the form of a letter-to-the-editor.  Of course, this was a letter to the editor of Nature--not exactly the Billboard Breeze of Sumpin', Montana, or the NYT or WSJ for that matter--where letters like this were more a quick way to get experimental results announced quickly, a rapid-publication device in the days when the scientific weekly was the quickest way of getting news out the fellow researchers. 

But, no matter--it is still a short introduction to a long idea, not quite as romantic as the lede implies.  Chadwick's  "Possible Existence of a Neutron", appeared in Nature on 27 February 1932. It takes up a tidy and compact  1.25 columns, all on one page (312) of this issue of the journal. It is in a sort of imaginary "tradition" of great letters-to-the-editor, like the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper ("The Origin of Chemical Elements", on the stuff of the Big Bang, a 1948 paper published in the journal Physical Review that worked out the basis for the formation of particles in the universe), another instance of a major scientific announcement being made as a "simple" presentation to the journal's editor. 

Stephens' Nuclear Fission Bibliography, 1946

I've found this to be a very useful tool in the past and decided to strip it out of the Internet Archive copy of the 1946 book and post it separately.

Bibliography of 

NUCLEAR FISSION 
and 
ATOMIC ENERGY 
by 
WILLIAM E. STEPHENS (editor) 

and PARK HAYS MILLER, JR. BERNARD GOODMAN, KNUT KRIEGER, WALTER E. MEYERHOF, 
MARGARET N. LEWIS, BERNARD SERIN, SIMON PASTERNACK, ROBERT H. VOUGHT 
Members of the Staff of the University of Pennsylvania 

THE SCIENCE PRESS 
Lancaster, Pa. 
1948

Source:  Internet Archive 

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ON NUCLEAR FISSION AND 
TRANSURANIC ELEMENTS 

Turner's Bibliographic Review of Nuclear Fission 1934-1940

Louis Turner’s Review of Published Work on Nuclear Fission, 1934-1940.

With a List of Turner's References (Below)

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I've found this article¹ by physicist Louis A. Turner to be very helpful over the years. He was an I-was-there guy (and actually an I-am-here guy) who wrote a stuccato article on the history of nuclear fission which was top heavy in references, and did so in 1940, just before the clamp came down on publication on the topic. Certainly there are other more modern efforts in this area that are far more detailed, but few have managed to do so good a job in as limited space as Turner, which the fabulous John A. Wheeler recognized as a "great and timely" review².

Notes:

1. Louis Turner. "Nuclear Fission." Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1940. An article in the Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 12/1, January 1940, pp 1-30 of an issue of 85pp Original orange wrappers. Fine condition. Also contains articles by Seaborg and Zwicky.

2. J.A. Wheeler, "Fission in 1939, the Puzzle and the Promise " Annual Reviews, 1989.

 

His 133 references can be read as a succession of one-line histories of the subject (barring the permissions to reproduce the entire article):

1. E. Fermi, Nature 133, 898 1934.

2. E. Amaldi, O. D'Agostino, F. Rassetti and E. Segrè, Proc. Roy. Soc. A146, 483 1934.

3. I. Noddack, Zeits. f. angew. Chimie. 37, 653 1934.

4. O. D'Agostino and E. Segrè, Gaz. Chim. Ital. 65, 1088 1935.

5. I. Curie, H. von Halban and P. Preiswerk, J. de phys. [7] 6, 361 1935; C.R. 200, 1841 1935; 200, 2079 1935.

 

The Future of Sucking, Part II--Supersonic Travel Tunnel

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2090 (continuing an earlier post)

I found a report by John Prather in 1945 continues a sluggish history of underground high-speed travel. There's a scifi story by Jules Verne's son, Michael, Un Express de l'avenir (An Express of the Future), written in 1888, and a 1913  novel Der Tunnel by Bernhard Kellermann, and a very pretty example, a New York-Los Angeles bullet train as found in Modern Mechanix in 1948:

There's also a very fine effort described in the wonderful Improbable Research website, an 1825 effort, describing a 5-minute ride from London to Edinburgh.

John B. Prather launched an idea in 1945 for building a high-speed pneumatic passenger/freight train connecting New York City to Philadelphia.  His New York-Philadelphia Vacuum Tunnel, Preliminary Design Features and Economic Analysis (the original available on our blog bookstore) was exceptionally hearty. The idea is interesting in a removed, lets-not-do-it way because, well, it just doesn't seem to make sense in the long run, at least beyond the building of the thing to show that it could be done.  And I don't doubt that could be the case--I just don't know why it was necessary. 

Mr. Prather's approach seems to be the work of an engineer, or at least he had some help.  I doubt though that he had any help from a structural engineer or site geologist--his proposal was to build this tunnel 100' down through bedrock when it could be found, a level hundred-feet  below the surface, from NYC to Philadelphia.   The tube would accommodate an aluminum-shelled  400'-long train that would be hauling 350 people and 175 tons of freight at speeds of 400-600+ mph, making the run between the two cities in about 20 minutes.  Not bad.  He figures too that all of the freight could be offloaded in 7.5 minutes.  This would make for  a very busy train, though Prather doesn't tell us how many runs a day it would be making. This was all preliminary.

The 16.2'-wide  tunnel would be 456,720 feet long, and would cost $173 million to excavate and $41 million to line with cement--according to the author.  The total cost for the ordeal would be about $334 million and would take 6 years, start to finish--that includes all of the tunneling, which would swallow/excavate/face 300' per day. 

I don't see, really, how this could be so narrow a tunnel--I'm not an engineer but it would seem that wear, heat and the abuse and so on that a massive and dense 400'-long missile going 400+mph would require something that was more than 125% of the width of its trains. 

There is however  precedence for a massive tunnel of something like this size being built in something like this time--the Delaware Aqueduct is 82 miles long and 13 feet wide, and was built during the Second World War (1939-1945) , so, perhaps if enough people and money were thrown at a project like the vacuum tunnel could actually be built (barring geological problems). 

But it would all be worth it:  Prather suggests that the overall revenue from the operation of the train to be $196 million/year with $32 million in yearly operating expenses.  Which means that the whole thing could be paid for in three years or thereabouts.  So if the things was started in 1946, it would all be finished and paid for by 1956.

I can understand his thinking, though, especially when you consider the impact of the year (1945) in which this paper was written.  The U.S. was came away from WWII by far more strong than any country on Earth, with its GDP being about 50% of that of the entire world--on the other hand, the federal deficit was 125% of the GDP, so perhaps in addition to being in an extraordinary position, investment was also somewhat gunshy.  And of course there's the problem of whether Prather's idea made any sense at all.  But I can understand the high times during which his project was announced. 

I've looked at a number of proposals like this over the course of this blog--like almost filling up the Narrows between Staten Island and Manhattan with an airport and seaport, and making a series of transoceanic airports for flights between the continents, and dropping a gigantic shell filled with people from the top/interior of the Eiffel into a narrow hole filled with water, and covering Midtown Manhattan with a rooftop airport, and covering Midtown Manhattan with a glass-ish dome, and so on--and I know that it is good for at least one thing:  superb classroom discussion fodder of why something like this does or doesn't make good physical/economic etc. sense.

 

 

A Note from the Future: a Computer-Needs Questionnaire from 1953

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2089 

At a time when computers were big, heavy, electrically-scented, hot and expensive (ranging into the hundreds of thousands of 1953 dollars, many millions in 2013 bucks), and coming at a time when very few individual companies (exterior to the military/industrial sphere or insurance) actually owned one of these machines, Lawrence Wainwright wrote a useful guide to potential computer-buyers,  “Digital Computer Questionnaire”. Appearing in  the world’s first publicly-published computation/computer journal, Computers and Automation, Wainwright sets out in six single-spaced pages a very tight and logical set of questions for the would-be buyer of one of these early god-sent beasties. I've illustrated the non-illustrated questionnaire with a series of images from another article found a little deeper in the same journal, "A Pictorial Introduction to Computers",  which appeared in June, 1957.  

 

As I read through the list (excepted below) it becomes obvious that the really good questions are deftly asked, and that the possible buyer would be well on their way to having a good dialog with the seller.

The questions do have a real flavor of antiquity to them, much like monied Parisians  with their detailed list of questions for their 15th century water-carrier:  where are you getting your water? What sort of bucket? How distant the source?  How cold? Is it sweet? Soft? Etc.  Good questions that made sense for their time, important, integral--until the water carrier (like the brick/mortar bookstore, or the computer questionnaire from 1953) was replaced by something more efficient, like a water delivery system.  

This questionnaire is like a communication from the future to me, a reminder about our own current organization of knowledge and how it will seem to an observer in 25 years (or 50, or 100) and how soon pressing issues and sustained/necessary info will be delegated to the ever-creepingly speeding "antiquity".
 The questions are excellent—they are just old, and no longer applicable, much like our own will soon be.   

 

 Digital computer Questionnaire

[Lawrence Wainwright, Del Mar California]

Less-than-Optimum Oblivion: Measuring the Bad Side of Advanced Nuclear Exchange, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 2087

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established oar labeled so; perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be officially, recognizably, the case.  And perhaps the greater the obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so.  Perhaps nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving” that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night, just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956 (The Concentration of Essential Personnel in American Cities, by Margaret Bright Rowan, published by the RAND Corporation, May 1956, in 72pp) the great issue seems to be laid to rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people will be killed.  And if those people in the cities are there because of professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people will be killed than not.  

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions.  And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear “exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed, thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war. 

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse world.  Of course these people would be killed because it was their industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the components necessary to build, say, a B-52.  That part of the equation is not addressed here, though.  Nor is there any sort of recommendation presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated, saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what?  There were other evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning, sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew--one of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in print.  And so it did.

Naive-Outsider Titles--Masterpieces of Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books 

In my heaping pamphlet collection there is a sub-collection of works with impossible, outsider-y, and stubbornly semi-confused titles that simply cannot be ignored--I mean the titles can't be ignored, though most of the time their texts beg to be. 

Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand

is about as ungainly a title for a book that you could construct in eight words or less.  Then there's

Total Omitters of Realities

a title which is as anti-compelling as the first but accomplishing that feat in half the words, and uses the plural of "reality" just for good measure. Creating another competing title in two words would be fairly improbable. 

Then there are the pamphlets that have no titles on their covers, though they do have title pages, though they really don't look like it, even though they are.  And even when they are what they seem to be not, they really aren't even that.  Such is the case of

When Where and How do you see RED ask me one of the Million.

 

I have no idea what this pamphlet can be about. 

Opened to a random page, I see in heavy underline "The human knower's point of view inside your head and mine and the power of the pen".

It is a mystery--it is also one of the few title pages I have seen that asks for the signature of a "witness". 

 

 

On the History of Wide Things: Cars, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 2086

Chrysler Motors was really on a hayride when their New Worlds in Engineering (1941) booklet hit the presses in 1940. From about 1930 to 1940 they produced about 8 million automobiles—more than a million in 1939 alone. 

Their cars got bigger, heavier, and of course, wider--on a course with the rest of the American automobile industry to secure their shiney spot in the Manifest Destiny of Wide. This ultra-wide model (above) was a bit of a peek into what the future might hold for the automotive company—the license plate says “1948”, and the car is definitely, defiantly, prodigiously, wide.  Those three heads peeping up above the dash really are sitting in a front seat front seat that looks as though it still held room for one more.  The razor-cheeked platinum blonde behind the wheel look as though her pencil fingers were just able to wrap around what looks to be a gigantic steering wheel.  –the two women actually look like they have the situation under control, while the eyebrow-arched male passenger looks to have something on his mind.  Perhaps his 1948-future self was thinking about the sweepingly sleek “Chrysler Royale”, which is not only wide but also very long, though it unfortunately has not dated license plate out front to give him any hope of when he might be able to expect to see this futurmobile.

In this picture (below) we get another glimpse of the wide future over the shoulder of a Chrysler designer.  Still another look-at-wide is this fellow in the purple smock from the art and design department who was molding new instrument display panels in clay—they seem long enough for this man to lay out in fron of and still have plenty of room left over.

It seems to me that all of these cars are wider than the widest of the wide production vehicles, including the unstoppably wide North African dune vehicle, the Unimog 5000, which measured in at 247 cm for its 2002 model. 

I’m not sure where the roads were that these wide cars were going to travel on—but since they were future cars I guess they were all going just one way, so two-way streets could become one-ways, double-wide...

[“Tomorrow department” is taken from the Chrysler Corp’s  “Chrysler Junior Craftsmen” department for the 11-16 year old sons of Chrysler employees, and which was nicknamed the “Tomorrow Department”. ]

Imaginary New York City Landscapes from CON-ED, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  

These lovely images are found in a long, shining and slightly darkroom-smelling The City of Light, which was a pamphlet made for the Consolidated Edison exhibition at the New York City World's Fair of 1939.  Con Ed I think just wanted to get the point across that they saw into the future and were getting ready for it, NYC being stuffed to the gills with buildings and each window stuffed and outlined in Con Ed-supplied electric light.  The vision is vaguely threatening to me, though, the buildings in a stadium-seating arrangement that is unsettling, like they're part of our robot-overlord future--someone or something must be living in those room filled with Con Ed light, though...

A Few More Trees in the Display of Information

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I'd like to add the few images below to a developing thread on the use of trees in diagrammatic displays of information as seen earlier on this blog in the following posts:

• Trees as Symbols int he Display of Information

• The Tree of Life and Coal's Phylogeny--a decent Diagram but a Bad Idea

• The Family Tree of Computer Development

This is a distinctive utilization, featuring a king and queen versions of the tree/plant display, this by Edward Hitchcock (1763-1864) in his Elementary Geology, published in 1840, and showing paleontological chart of trees andplants:

At about the same time came this outline for a tree diagram, (of embryonic development), from Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, printed in 1844, and which shows a model of development where fish (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to mammals (M):

And somehow in the different representations of the tree of life by Ernst Haeckel I failed to include these three very famous renderings, the first made for an English-language edition of his Evolution of Man, which appeared in 1879:

And this version, which appeared in the fifth edition of his Evolution of Man, printed in London in 1910:

And yet another, this one much earlier, in 1866:

Quantum Mechanics and Physics Timelines

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Reference Tool series

[Max Planck, 1933]

Quantum Mechanics Chronologies

• Quantum Theory Timeline  //  Particle Adventure  About 50 entries, no bibliographic data ; simple introductory timeline.  http://www.particleadventure.org/other/history/quantumt.html  .

• Timeline of Quantum Mechanics  Probably 150 entries and 77 bibliographic notes including links to the original articles.  Pretty nice.  The "History of QM" wiki entry is fairly basic. (Wiki) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_mechanics

• Good introductory timeline from Northwestern U along with annotation (1814-1927) http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/Ideas/quantum_timeline.html

• AlphaCenturi Quantum Timeline  Short timeline but picks up James Franck in 1914.  http://www.alpcentauri.info/quantum_mechanics_timeline.html

• TimeRime. Kind of a short, splashy presentation with only a dozen dates or so. http://timerime.com/en/timeline/138786/Quantum+Theory/

• Chronology of Quantum Mechanics, Molecular, Atomic, Nuclear, and Particle Physics http://www.3rd1000.com/chronology/chrono3.htm

And this, a chronology of general physics, with a good selection in QM: 

• Big but incomplete, which means you'll have to get the book itself:  Chronology of Science by Lisa Rezende.  Google book, here.

 

Good, Early Review of Some of the Fine Work of Claude Shannon

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I just read an interesting "review" of sorts of the mechanical and electronic automation/robotic work of the great Claude Shannon--it was in George Boehm's  "Gypsy, Model VI, Claude Shannon, Nimwit, and the Mouse" and published in Computers and Automation, volume 2, number 2, March 1953.  Shannon (1916-2001) is widely seen as being the "father of information theory" though it might be more accurate to refer to him as the 'father of the information age". 

Shannon basically established the foundation of the digital circuits in his 1937 A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, which was also one of those great dreams-come-true parts of graduate school, when your masters' thesis is actually a very important work--this was the case for Shannon, who actually did it with this paper at the age of 21. In the midst of a brilliant young career he also produced (in 1948) another great landmark,  A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which is the pioneering paper on information theory and which was so brilliantly composed that its framework is still in place after 65 years. A year later came Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, a work which established cryptography as a science more than a system. And on and on. 

I like that Shannon was born in Petosky, Michigan, up there on the choppy Little Traverse, and all of those big-pebble Petosky fossil/stones.

The Boehm article is very insider-y semi-offhand but solid review of some of the gadgetry and robotic work of Claude Shannon--it is only four pages but it is four good pages, which I reproduced below.  Enjoy. [The original is actually available for sale at the blog's bookstore, here.]

A Note on Mr. Venn and his Diagrams

JF Ptak Science Books
 

It seems so unlikely that the Venn diagrams took so long to appear, that it hadn't been Aristotle's Diagrams, or Cartesian Diagrams; rather, these elegant creations--about a different way to represent propositions by diagrams-- belong to Mr. Venn's invention in 1880. Mostly. It was in that year that these famous more fully-developed diagrams first appeared in a paper entitled "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings" in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science.  They seem so beautiful, and so simple, and so powerful, and so elegant. So necessary.  And so why-did-they-take-so-long-to-appear, so obvious.  In a way, they are in that category of The Great Obvious Invention, in a similar vein to Mr. Luke Howard first classifying the names of clouds  in 1803.  Sometimes things are not obvious until they are.  

 

[Source: Internet Archives, John Venn, Symbolic Logic, 1881, full text.]

 

Well, almost.  The diagrams did mostly make an appearance earlier--though not in the Venn form--in the work of Christian Weise (d. 1708) and then in that of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), that according to the great William Rowan Hamilton, explained in his work Metaphysics and Logic (1858-1860). But the final form seems to be that of Venn.  

Hamilton's work appears so:

 

They also appeared in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, volume 4, 1880, in his article "On the employment of geometrical diagrams for the sensible representation of logical propositions" in which he discusses the history of the diagrams, including the Hamilton history.  Venn also includes this beautiful logic template of Bolzano:

I found a wonderful book review of Venn's book Symbolic Logic that appeared the following year, appearing in the journal Nature on 14 July 1881, and reviewed by the inimitable W. Stanley Jevons (which is reproduced below).

SunPunk, 1888

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[This image appears in his "The Sun Motor", in Nature for August 1888.]

A while ago I thought about an alphabet of variegated -punkisms since SteamPunk didn't seem quite enough for things punky. (That post, Beginning an Alphabet of Science Fiction -punkism is here, though it didn't get much leg.)  In addition to that alphabet there's also FuturePunk, ElectroPunk, and AirPunk, among others--but tonight I'd like to introduce SunPunk to this mix.  There's a possibility for a lot of indirect steam from SunPunk, and in this instance there is a lot of metal. the other thing, however, is that it was real.

The work (above) is that of the very versatile John Ericsson (1803-1889), who among other things perfected the modern screw propeller and designed the USS Monitor (and who also has one of those Mystery Monuments in D.C.).  Ericsson was fascinated by the possibilities of solar power, and worked on the problem for 25 years, right up until his death.  The metallic bed of his creation would hold 100 sqft of mirrors "presented at right angles to the sun, at noon, int he latitude of New York, during summer, develops a mechanical energy reaching 1,850,000 footpounds per square hour", which was enough to run a good engine.

Now the idea for using the Sun as a machine is ancient, with references and details appearing in the works of Euclid, and Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria, though the first practical construction of one (outside of a solar oven and such) is relatively recent, by Augustin Mouchot in 1860.  Actually, Mouchot exhibited an incredible sun machine (his Sun Concentrator) in 1869:

[Source: Land Art Generator Initiative, here.]

His engine was indeed a beautiful thing, and it does have the elements of severe AirPunk, but I think it doesn't have that certain weightiness of the Ericsson engine.

 

 

 

Bathroom Buddha Mistletoe Urinal--the Most-Missing Piece of Modern Art?

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2085    Blank, Empty & Missing Things series  

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” (Marcel Duchamp)

I guess to this quote you could replace "spectator" with just about anything else, including the object that is the art.

This ten-minute missive came from a post a few days ago (Napkins of the Apocalypse) where I located the ultimate end of the American civil defense experience during the Cold War--in the spindle hole of a survival LP issued by a trashy-thready record label in 1962. I wondered if the hopes/dream/prayers of that episodic horrorshow belonged more in the Blank/Missing/Empty or the Holes series of this blog...and where that dark hole fit.

[Image source:  Stephen Hicks]

The hole re-appeared this morning while doing the dishes, the drain in the sink sparking a vision of "FiVah" (or "Five A", anti-art's anti-anti-artist) Marcel Duchamp and his iconic found art sculpture "Fountain".  It is of course the most famous urinal in the history of urination (I can't speak to famous urinals in non-urinating history) which Duchamp signed "R.Mutt" in 1917 to make it his own.  Art.

There are many missing qualities to this artwork that allows it to slide right into this blog's Blank, Empty and Missing Things series, not the least of which is that the first "Fountain" went missing almost immediately.  It was rejected from a major show of Duchamp's colleagues, and left a footprint of itself with a blank exhibition card dispaly, nonchalantly photographed in front of a Marsden Hartley painting.  It was a shocking piece of art that lead and still leads to debate on what is art and what is not, especially so far as "original" artwork is concerned. 

"Fountain" has/had a number of questions about originality--as a concept it was certainly original, in the use of found object as a piece of sculptural art, and of course in its own self, being a urinal and all.  Then there's the question of this original idea being so but being hosted in a stock/standard item that was hardly an original construction--it was a simple porcelain object from an assembly line production.  that said, even though this was not original when it came to replacing the lost not-original original it proved to be very difficult, at least it was back then in the nineteen-teens. 

The urinal that replaced the missing urinal was not quite right, and so was not the not-original original replacing the not-original non-art that was a great original idea. 

"Fountain" reminded people of a Buddha; it was hung in various unusual places and its iterations shown in exhibitions far-and-wide, including a very early Dada exhibit where one of them was hung from the ceiling of the gallery with a piece of Mistletoe attached, perhaps in a Duchampian way telling people to "kiss off". 

So this great instigator and Jimmy-Hoffa-of-Artworks was missing on many levels--it was a mass-produced private work that was censored by its artist's peers, and original piece of art that wasn't itself original and that went missing almost as soon as it was created.

It has everything in nothing going for it.